Salon.com owes Cantor an apology and retraction

By Ann Kane

All journalists get facts wrong on occasion; they even wrongly speculate at times. Here's Salon's take on Eric Cantor's announcement last Thursday that someone had shot into his conference room window. All the barbs directed at Cantor in this piece sound like classic projection.

A day after telling reporters someone shot up his office, and implying it was because he's Jewish, Cantor's story had fallen so completely to pieces that his aides didn't even bother to defend it anymore.

[snip]

Cantor's statement about receiving threats was as melodramatic as it was self-contradictory; he accused Democrats of stirring up trouble by talking about threats, barely a minute after he talked about threats he'd gotten himself.

[snip]

That may well be true -- why bother checking out the story ahead of time, when the only point of telling it is to confuse people in the first place? Even Democrats said Thursday they admired the way Cantor managed to shift the way people were talking about the threats and violence. After all, in the 24-hour news cycle, you only need to buy a few minutes to score a victory.

Here's the true story as related by Michelle Malkin in her blog titled, "FBI charges anti-Semitic nutball with threats against GOP Rep. Cantor & family; "

Today, a two-count complaint and warrant was filed charging Norman Leboon with threatening to kill United States Congressman Eric Cantor and his family, and threatening to kill Congressman Eric Cantor, who is an official of the United States, announced United States Attorney Michael L. Levy and FBI Special Agent in Charge Jan Fedarcyk.

Hey Mr. Mike Madden of Salon.com, how about a retraction and an apology to Mr. Cantor? We won't hold our breath.